Before Regret - Property Insights

Know what to check before you sign — any US address

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I've spent the last few weeks building Before Regret, and it came out of one observation: almost every tool in the property-research space will confidently tell you things it cannot possibly know. Generated "risk scores" with no method behind them. Invented property histories. Numbers that look authoritative and have no source you can click. So I set one rule at the start, and it ended up shaping everything: the report never states a fact the site can't point at. In practice that means two checks run live against your address — seismic hazard from the USGS, and address validation against US Census records. Everything else is a direct link to the actual official record: FEMA, EPA, USDA, the DOT, the FCC, and your county's own permit portal. Every one of those is explicitly labelled unverified until you open it yourself. That's less impressive than a confident one-page AI summary. It's also true, and you can check every line of it. The same rule cost me something. I ran a national analysis of what Americans actually pay for homeowners insurance versus the risk they face — 3,093 counties, 50.7 million mortgaged households, built from Census and FEMA data. My first version was wrong: one territory's premiums skewed the whole result, and the headline finding was an artifact. Rather than quietly re-run it, the correction is written into the study. You can look up any US county here: beforeregret.com/research/risk-without-price/ There are also 150+ guides on permits, aluminium wiring, cast iron pipes, panel recalls and what specific inspection findings actually mean. It's early and plenty is missing. The question I'd most like answered: what would you want checked before you bought a house? That's what I'll build next.